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    One Acre and Insecurity: A Single Parent’s Account
    One Acre and Insecurity: A Single Parent’s Account
    One Acre and Insecurity: A Single Parent’s Account
    Ebook95 pages1 hour

    One Acre and Insecurity: A Single Parent’s Account

    By Lara Bonnell

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    About this ebook

    When left to raise four children alone, their librarian mother relies on a practical volume with the title One Acre and Security. In a small house on nearly an acre the family struggles to raise most of their own food, but the results are mixed and sometimes hilarious. Read on to see how repeated crises and complications require creative parenting solutions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWestBow Press
    Release dateOct 6, 2017
    ISBN9781973602446
    One Acre and Insecurity: A Single Parent’s Account
    Author

    Lara Bonnell

    After years of teaching high school English, Lara Bonnell trained to become a college reference Librarian and Archivist because she needed regular hours on the job without evenings spent grading papers and preparing lesson plans. Why? Because she had become a single mother with four offspring--three girls and one boy--due to two divorces. As a published poet, she also taught “Creative Writing” on an adjunct contract to increase her income. This book details their struggles to raise most of their own food inspired by the book One Acre and Security with mixed, sometimes hilarious results. The author hopes her desperate coping with a variety of parenting crises and complications may assist other single parents to persevere, especially through the dreaded teenage years. She has three poetry collections and a novel in print with more writing now that her four offspring are finally solid, honest citizens on their own.

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      Book preview

      One Acre and Insecurity - Lara Bonnell

      Copyright © 2017 Lara Bonnell.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      WestBow Press

      A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.westbowpress.com

      1 (866) 928-1240

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-9736-0243-9 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-9736-0244-6 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2017914155

      WestBow Press rev. date: 10/04/2017

      Contents

       Chapter 1   Becoming a Single Parent

       Chapter 2   The Book and Place to Resolve the Problem

       Chapter 3   Our Livestock and Garden

       Chapter 4   Son Ron and Private School

       Chapter 5   The Would-be Nun and Us

       Chapter 6   The Gifted One Gives Me Fits

       Chapter 7   Lessening the Parenting Load

       Chapter 8   Suitors and Other Prospects

       Chapter 9   This Feminist Defies Fate

       Chapter 10   Finally Finding Security

       EPILOGUE

      DEDICATION

      This is an Irish account (slightly exaggerated to lend a touch of humor to some basically impossible situations) of my years as a single parent with four teenagers. Since there were four adolescents and only one of me, they had to pitch in and help us survive as a family.

      We still couldn’t have made it without much prayer, a host of colorful friends plus supportive colleagues at River City College and my church. I hope this retelling of some very traumatic and crazy years will lend hope, perspective, and perhaps companionship to the many other single parents who would quit if they could, but who have no choice but to slog ahead amid the disarray of dreams for themselves and their offspring while fending off impending bankruptcy.

      This book is dedicated to the four participating survivors who have gone on to college and solid careers despite their mother’s often unorthodox and answer-to-prayer-at-wits-end parenting methods:

      Susan, Ron, Martha and Patty.

       CHAPTER ONE

      Becoming a Single Parent

      Like most single parents, I had not planned to be one. True, the children were always my idea. Having been raised as the oldest of four, I could hardly imagine a marriage without offspring. But the medical student I married was the younger of two, a much older sister completing their family. He observed that making ends meet while he was still in medical school in Cranston would be difficult enough without having kids. I would have to be content with a cat.

      I kept explaining to four-footed Molly, No kids, no kittens! when she’d go into heat yowling and grotesquely rolling around. In our fourth-floor walkup apartment in a condemned building catty-corner across from Cole County Hospital, our cat had a litter box in the non-functioning fireplace screened off for her privacy. If we did go outside with Molly, she was on a short leash which she despised.

      But one day she did manage to squeeze by me when I answered the door to a salesman. She zoomed down the four flights of steps, conned another tenant checking on mail to open the outer door, and wasn’t seen for two days despite several searches by this frantic owner. When Mollie reappeared, she was battered and bleeding—as anxious to return to our apartment as she’d been to leave it. Later we did have three tiger-striped kittens resulting from that adventure. Since Molly was an orange tabby, I surmised that the father must have been tiger-striped. However, I was jealous…no kids, but three kittens for which to find homes.

      Be patient, advised my spouse. I have to serve two years in the Army after interning. We can have a kid at government expense then if you and my folks are still so set on our having a baby.

      Despite having graduated with honors from the University of Indiana in English Teacher Training, I was working as an editor of reports for the Metallurgy Department of the Research Foundation at Cranston Institute of Technology. (In those days, if you weren’t a graduate from Cranston Teachers College, you must be a substitute teacher for two years before being assigned to a regular classroom.)

      My husband seldom came home, although spouses were permitted to join their mates for Sunday dinner at the hospital cafeteria. Each Saturday I’d take the El (elevated railway) downtown with a suitcase full of books to return to the Cranston Public Library in exchange for the next week’s reading supply. After lunch at a Chinese restaurant I’d head for my one extravagance, a dance lesson at the Murray Dance Studio.

      Eventually I earned a bronze medal there, the lowest rung of the ballroom dancing ladder. It was a nod to my childhood dream of becoming a graceful ballerina. This ambition was a source of great hilarity for my family since I was awkward, could fall up the stairs as well as down them, and had a knee that would occasionally lock and send me catapulting into hedges or onto lawns.

      Having no partner for dancing, tennis or bridge meant that the Cranston years were lonely, solo ones. However, I very carefully calculated the months until my doctor husband would graduate and enter the Army. Susan was born in Austin, Texas on the same day Morgan reported for duty.

      However, after ten years of marriage to that same medical student, intern, Army doctor, family physician, specialty resident, and Caring Clinic staff member, we were divorced. Although he did not consider I had enough class to match his new exalted and established status, I did have whatever was needed to have complete custody of our three children—Susan (age 6), Ronell or Ron (age 4) and Martha (almost 1 year).

      Instead of alimony (being inexperienced and terribly proud), I asked for only enough funding to complete a master’s degree within two years to be able to earn enough to support the kids and myself. I didn’t want him running our lives. After all, I had given up the offer of a graduate fellowship to marry my medical student fiance on my graduation day. Another big and prideful error was limiting his child support payments to the minimum $50 per child per month required by Indiana law to guarantee his visitation rights plus two weeks each summer and an early Christmas every Thanksgiving Break. I could count on $150 per month in child support. He could claim all three children as dependents on his income tax, but to justify that, he would be responsible for dental, medical, and music or other lesson bills.

      By the end of the first month after the divorce became final I realized that I should have listened to my lawyer and parents who had urged me to ask for much more. However, I stuck to the agreement, learning to economize and

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